Unions: A Prehistoric Invention

My mother works at a company that considers 35 hours a week full-time. She receives well above minimum wage and consistently receives overtime and holiday bonuses. She has stock options, a 401(k), and health insurance. What she doesn’t have, though, is a labor union representing her. My mother works at Target. She has all of the things that unions fight hard to get for their members, yet a union has never set foot in her store. This makes me question why unions are still around. They are an old invention and their effectiveness today is questionable. They were once an asset to workers, but because many of the problems they were created for are now almost non-existent, labor unions are highly outdated and unnecessary, creating more problems than they do solutions.

Unions help members who are unjustly fired get their jobs back and aid their them when they are having trouble at work. These benefits seem simple, but unions can twist them and cause employers trouble that they doesn’t deserve. Kenny Rogers, a former Major League Baseball pitcher, assaulted two cameramen in June of 2005 while with the Texas Rangers. He was suspended for 20 games and fined $50,000. However, according to a Wall Street Journal article on the incident, due to the baseball players union’s “chronic obstreperousness... Rogers will be paid 100% of his salary during his hiatus” (Moores D8). The punishment was also “...being contested by the union” (Moores D8). It is not only sports players that receive this treatment. According to a Wall Street Journal article, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, during an education conference, said “...union work rules prevent principals from firing the bad teachers and rewarding the good ones” (“Non-Union Jobs” A10). He also said that “‘this unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy’” (“Non-Union Jobs” A10). That may be so, but it is not nearly as crazy as this story my mother told me: a woman who worked with my mother at Target also had a job at Kroger, a grocery store. She had a history of alcohol abuse and one day stole alcohol from Kroger and drank it while on the clock. She was promptly dismissed. However, Kroger is a union company and the union demanded that the employee not only be re-hired but that Kroger pay for her rehabilitation. This practice is ludicrous. While it appears to help a union’s members, it is really hurting them, along with the employer. Rogers did not deserve to be paid his salary after assaulting those two men and it sets a terrible precedent for other misbehaving athletes. Teachers shouldn’t be kept on a school’s payroll if they are underperforming and teachers who do their jobs proficiently should be paid more than their ineffectual counterparts. Employees who drink on the job are a danger to themselves, their co-workers, and customers and shouldn’t have their rehab paid by their employer.

Unions claim to represent their members and lobby lawmakers to get bills passed that will aid them. This is true, I won’t deny it, but unions rarely put their members’ agendas before their own. In a Wall Street Journal written by John Zogby, president and CEO of Zogby International, a renowned polling firm, he stated “...I asked voters whether the AFL-CIO spoke for them when they went to the polls. The answers produced a real surprise: Among unionized likely voters, just 27% said the AFL-CIO spoke for them all or most of the time” (A10). That was in 2005. Four years later, unions continue to push legislation that most members do not support. Take the Employee Free Choice Act as an example. According to a Commentary article from October 2009, “the bill’s chief provisions authorize union formation in a workplace by ‘card check’- a euphemism for replacing a secret-ballot election on the potential unionization of a workplace with a system by which unions could secure exclusive bargaining rights through authorization cards...” (Rubin). This is harmful to workers attempting to form a union, because the vote are no longer anonymous. However, “...organized labor has deemed the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act its ‘number one legislative priority’ and has undertaken a vigorous national ad campaign on its behalf” (Rubin). This blatant practice of putting the organization’s agenda over its members’ needs is a terrible policy. Unions are not lobbies. They employ lobbyists, but they should be lobbying lawmakers based on the opinions of their members, not the suits in the corporate office.

Suits in the corporate office are better than the shady characters that have had connections to unions throughout history though. According to a Congressional Quarterly report on the history and future of unions “according to federal authorities, union and mob bosses often team up to demand kickbacks from union members in return for prime job assignments. Crime families also have been known to demand money from contractors in exchange for ‘labor peace.’ And contractors on union projects sometimes must pay salaries for ‘ghost’ employees- crime family members who either don’t show up or show up but do not work” (Prah). These practices have occurred since the 1950’s and continue today. According to the same report “by 2004, the Labor Department’s inspector general had 359 pending labor racketeering investigations, of which more than a third involved organized crime” (Prah). Mob ties aren’t the only corrupting factors. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch article from October 2009 reports that “the president of a national labor union was arrested... for allegedly taking $20,000 in bribes from a St. Louis lawyer, the U.S. attorney’s office said” (Patrick). This widespread criminal activity within unions sullies their supposedly good intentions and brings their legitimacy into question.

When unions were first formed, working conditions in many industrial workplaces were terrible. Pay was minimal and workloads were nigh impossible to complete. Unions came into workplaces and brought many reforms. They presented the problems in front of Congress, which passed legislation improving workers’ conditions and pay. I do not deny that unions have done a lot for workers. However, because Congress has passed several laws over the years protecting workers and insuring certain benefits, unions are unneeded. They do more bad than they do good. And union membership is steadily declining, with “...less than 8% of private sector workers unionized” (Zogby A10).

According to Zogby, “...39% of workers believe that while unions once were necessary, their time has passed...” (A10). My mother is one of these people. She may work at Target but she is able to get union benefits without the union headaches. With a misuse of policies, a practice of pushing their agendas over their members’, and a history of corruption, unions are unnecessary and outdated, creating problems when they should be creating solutions.

By Noah Frederick